It’s Oscars season baby! Ah, yes, the most wonderful time of the year: celebs out on the town, congratulating themselves for their own successes, receiving rewards for work they’ve already made millions off of. I LOVE THAT. The Oscar nominations that came out a few weeks ago in preparation for the biggest night of the year (March 4, 2018), were full of surprises and also exactly what everyone thought was going to happen. Let’s break down the best picture nominees!
The nominations for best picture are out and are as predictable as always! We’ve got: Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, The Shape of Water, Call Me by Your Name, Phantom Thread, Lady Bird, Get Out, The Post, Darkest Hour, and Dunkirk. All films that have been thoroughly successful throughout this awards season, and have been tapped by various Oscar Prognosticators as the leading candidates for Best Picture. I’ve asked Mr. Tagg, a former teacher at CKM and avid film lover, to weigh in on a couple of the nominees.
Mr. Tagg says on Martin McDonagh’s Three Billboards, “Three Billboards was amazing in a lot of ways. I was not expecting a movie so good in making rounded characters who actually changed and revealed new characteristics about themselves. It conspicuously avoided a cliched plot. A Frances McDormand film festival is needed.”
Critics feel generally the same, coming in at 92% on Rotten Tomatoes. There have been recent critiques on the subject of race and the film. The film’s use of a racist cop that openly uses the n-word, and who has tortured a black man in custody has raised concerns.
“McDonagh painstakingly humanizes a character who we find has unapologetically tortured a black man in police custody … and then Three Billboards seems to ask audiences to forgive and forget wrongs like police violence, domestic abuse, and sexual assault without demonstrating a full understanding of the centuries-long toll these crimes have taken on victims in real life,” wrote April Wolfe, a film critic at the Village Voice.
“In some ways, watching this film is like reading those alt-right fashion profiles of Richard Spencer that insisted we overlook his campaign of quiet terror and find common ground with him. Nope,” Wolfe added. The film is still a prospective winner for the Oscar, despite its obvious flaws.
Speaking of probable (and predictable) winners, we have Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water. In the words of Mr. Tagg: “The Shape of Water didn’t totally kill me, but it’s growing on me. The idea of an interspecies love story is good, and the characters were all very broad and well acted. As for setting, the cloak-and-dagger stuff didn’t do anything for me.” Mr. Tagg’s feelings capture the general mood of many film critics, as many say the film was great, but not groundbreaking.
The Shape of Water is largely considered the safe bet by many film watchers and lovers. Even as the story is lauded, it is veritably neutral. It is actually not all that edgy, despite the whole fishman-human love story, and is therefore a frontrunner for the prize. The film leads the bunch with some 13 nominations.
Get Out. I mean, need I say more? The movie is a masterful debut from director Jordan Peele, and one of the most nuanced, meaningful films to come out of the industry in a while. A critics darling, the film has a 99% on Rotten Tomatoes. Further, it is a testament to the importance of representation. Stories written for and by people of color can be wildly successful, a good lesson to teach the studios and production houses.
I would be remiss to not mention Lady Bird. The movie is a coming of age acted with charm by Saoirse Ronan, shot beautifully, and directed by the brilliant Greta Gerwig. It has been written and talked about here in Sacramento so often, I don’t think there’s much more to say other than the movie deserves some recognition. Greta Gerwig winning Best Director would be well deserved, and it would make her only the second woman to ever win the award in the Oscars’ 88 year history (which is completely ridiculous). Films like Get Out and Lady Bird prove that minorities and women can not only be critically successful, but profitable as well. I hope this means we will be seeing more of them soon.
Call Me by Your Name has been celebrated as a coming of age story surrounding first love and the Italian countryside. The film itself is beautifully shot and wonderfully acted. Though, there have been concerns raised about the use of straight people depicting the LGBTQI characters, along with the considerable age gap between leads Armie Hammer and Timothee Chalamet, and the romanticization thereof.
The next subsection of nominations I like to call: Forgettable White People Doing Things Also A Meryl Streep Movie Because She Is Required to Be Nominated. This subsection consists of movies like Phantom Thread, Dunkirk, Darkest Hour, The Post. I haven’t seen em. But like, have you? They probably won’t win, as they haven’t done very well so far in the awards season. But who am I to say, this could be another Crash or Moonlight year (These movies certainly are no Moonlight, however).
These nominations may have been completely predictable, as they always are, but I guess we could say that’s just part of the Oscar charm. I would also like to note that movies like Get Out or Lady Bird would never have been on that list in years past, and for that I am excited. Excited for Oscar’s future, for a nominee list filled with Get Out’s and Lady Bird’s, and That-One-Movie-With-Meryl-Streep-Because-it’s-A-Requirement’s. This year’s nominations actually are a sign of progress, in their minute, predictable way.